


A Moment of Peace

by Loxxlay



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Anxiety Attacks, Blood and Violence, Brother Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Loki (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Mild Gore, No Named Character Dies, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), but also kind of a dick not gonna lie, implied suicidal ideation, in one and a half months, more references of torture, my headcanon, other gotg characters but they aren't in it enough to warrant a tag, this is about the trailer clip, thor whump, which will be ripped from me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-04 11:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14018976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loxxlay/pseuds/Loxxlay
Summary: Thor and Loki share a moment together, locked in a cell on Thanos's ship.(Written because the new Infinity War trailer gave me too many feels to process. T_T)Chapter 2: Loki executes his plan for them to escape. Thor disagrees with most of it.Chapter 3: Thor struggles with the loss of his brother.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Obvious spoilers for the Infinity War trailers if you haven't seen them already. Also somewhat graphic depiction of the aftermath of torture, including memory, pain, and vomiting (fun, right? XD)

When they threw him into the cell, Thor hit the cold, grimy floor face-first and he didn’t move for a long time.

His stomach writhed and lurched, sometimes gurgling to his throat, and waves of freezing cold nausea pulsed through his brain like a second heartbeat, foreign and overwhelming and sickening. At every moment of reprieve, he sucked in breath to fill his lungs, and then he held it when it felt like the cell, the ship, the universe itself was spinning, spinning, spinning.

How long he lay there, vulnerable and shaking, Thor did not know. He could not _think_ well enough to know.

It was only when an urgent shred of thought-- _Asgard, what is happening to the people of Asgard_ \--that Thor finally blinked. And steadied. Or perhaps the fact that he was finally steady was what freed him to the thought of his people.

Either way, Thor blinked at last and saw the tiled floor stretching into a stone grey wall lit orange by the glow of a single lamp. Cracks and indentations of shadow promised years of negligence, revealing the architecture as ancient. Maybe Thanos had owned this vessel for centuries--or maybe the vessel once belonged to someone who wasn’t him. Thor pretended the latter. It was more comforting that way.

The floor, pressed against his cheek, felt soothingly cool to his throbbing head, and as he blinked again, he felt its soothing touch along the pads of his fingers and his palms, as well. He gave himself another few seconds of peace before he braced himself and pushed.

At once, the room spun, his stomach twisted, and Thor heaved.

Vomit spat from his dry throat, and the smell burned through his nostrils, bringing tears to his eye. Luckily it wasn’t the nausea from before. Thor steadied again, rather quickly, finding himself panting on all fours and staring at the brown, flaky grains coating the floor beneath him. It looked like he’d vomited a fair amount of blood.

Fear surged through him, awake in his veins. Thor registered every pain in his body--from the smallest dull ache of bruises all the way to the throbbing churning of his brain.

He gasped in relief when he felt the sharp bite of a cut on the inside of his cheek and ran his tongue over it, tasting a metallic wetness. Good. So he wasn’t dying. He’d just swallowed too much blood.

Groaning, Thor threw himself away from the vomit and into a sitting position a couple feet away. It took him several seconds of dizziness before he could register what he was seeing--an arched stone frame and a sheet of metal comprising a sliding door. Without even having to try, Thor knew the door would never budge under his weight.

He tried anyway.

He forced himself to his feet, pressed both palms against the cold metal until he was steady, and pushed. He pushed so hard that he let loose a muffled roar, the veins in his muscles throbbing. But, even on his best day, Thor knew he wouldn’t have been strong enough.

And this wasn’t his best day, no, this wasn’t even a good day. It may even be his worst.

Thor shook with a heavy breath and rested his forehead on the metal door. Tears burned at the corners of his one eye, but he couldn’t-- _wouldn’t_ \--cry. Not here. Not now.

It was in that silence, that melancholy, that he finally noticed what he should have noticed from the very beginning--there was a second series of breaths that were not his own, there was a second person breathing, a second person here, in the cell.

His tears vanished. Thor stilled.

And looked.

In the corner veiled most of shadows sat Loki himself.

Curled there, he looked almost like he was at home. His head was tipped in rest against the wall and his knees were drawn up to his chest. Aside him, blocking him into the corner, was a crumbled pillar hindering any light from reaching Loki’s face, concealing him in darkness. The golden lamplight licked orange only across Loki’s pale knuckles, where his stiff fingers locked over his legs as if in a silent plea.

At the sight, a muted rage stirred in Thor’s heart. He remembered only one thing between the flashes of agony searing through his skull, and it was this: his brother, his dear, beloved brother standing alongside the compatriots of Thanos, stepping forward as a blue light sprung from the palm of his hand. Loki had given Thanos the Tesseract. Just as he’d tried to do all those years ago.

Thor swallowed a mouthful of adrenaline. Fighting was pointless. It was too late and he was too tired. “So,” he said instead, “this was your plan all along.”

Loki didn’t answer.

Perhaps Thor hadn’t been as tired as he’d thought, because the rage swelled in his throat, clumping there like blocks of stone. His heart pounded. “Tell me, Brother,” Thor spoke, his voice nearly shaking, “how long did it take to come up with this one? Did you think of it on your way to the vault? Make one quick stop on your way to Surtur’s crown for everything you needed, hmm? Or did you grab it on a whim and work out the details on the Commodore? As you were flying back to--to us--”

Thor choked on an unexpected ragged breath. How _real_ Loki had seemed, catching the cup-holder and smiling, his lips parting to form two words that Thor had never dared to hope for again-- _I’m here_ . Stroking Thor’s false sense of confidence, goading him into thinking that this _thing_ between them was salvageable--and for what?

Maybe it had only been to make the betrayal hurt that much more.

Pain stabbed through his skull like a sharp blade. Thor pressed his back against the door and sank to the floor, but no matter how hard he rubbed his temples or squeezed his nose, the throbbing wouldn’t go away.

“You should try to throw up again,” Loki said at last, his voice soft and quiet. “Sometimes that helps.”

Thor lifted his head with every intention of glaring at his brother, but even the thought of opening his eye roiled through his brain. Instead he worked moisture through his throat, enough to speak. “Why?” he asked. “So you can attack me while I’m prone before you? I think not.”

Once again, Loki went silent.

It was becoming clear in this silence why Thor hadn’t noticed him before. He sighed. “I’m tired of your games, Loki,” he said. “Why are you here?”

Just as the question left him, Thor realized that it was quite possible that Loki _wasn’t_ here. Since Loki still wasn’t answering, Thor drew upon his reserves of strength and fished for something, anything. His fingers curled around what felt like a piece of tile that had been chipped from the floor, and Thor looked just long enough to throw it in Loki’s general direction.

His one-eyed gaze struggled to penetrate the correct distance, and the nausea returning full-force threw off his aim entirely. The piece of floor tile hit the wall, a ring echoing through the walls of both the cell and Thor’s skull. Thor shook with a renewed urge to vomit.

“You don’t need to throw things,” Loki said after the ringing stopped. “I’m here. I promise.”

The words burned through Thor’s veins like poison. “Don’t say that.”

“Look,” Loki said after a sharp breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Oh? So what _did_ you mean to happen?” Thor tried to push a bitter smile on his face, but it wouldn’t come. He went on, desperate for the words that would make any of this right, or any better than it was. “Would you have rathered succeeded on Midgard? Given the Tesseract to him then?”

When Loki spoke, his voice was low and cold--and almost sounded upset: “No.”

Thor gritted his teeth, his throat swelling with hurt. “Then _why_?”

Nothing.

Thor waited a while longer, before he shook his head, wincing at the way his brain seemed to bounce around. “I might be able to forgive you for Midgard,” he said, meaning to sound sardonic but only sounding tired. “You were angry. Lashing out. I can forgive you for pretending to die a second time, ruling Asgard to ruin, and being willing to turn me over to that mad immortal.” He paused. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this.”

At last, there was a sound--a reaction--from Loki’s corner. A choked breath cutting through the silence. Loki’s fingers detached and folded behind his knees, leaving his entire body a mere shadowed silhouette, unreadable and unreachable.

Thor refused to feel guilty. “I just want to know why you did this. Why did you let him take me? Why did you give him the Tesseract?” Thor said. “Can’t you at least give me a reason?”

“I’m sorry,” Loki breathed. “I had no choice.”

Thor’s fists clenched. “Do not insult my intelligence. You _chose_ to be there in the first place.”

“I did _not_ \--”

“Then why were you just _standing_ there?” Thor growled. “You stood among those creatures who are loyal to him, I _saw_ you standing with them. Why did you just stare at him while he--while--” _while he turned my mind into mud_ , Thor thought, but couldn’t say.

This time, when it came, the nausea won. Thor barely managed to roll onto all fours before he was spitting bile and saliva onto the floor and gasping from the misery of it. Afterwards, while he crouched and panted, he realized the throbbing _did_ abate some, just as Loki had promised--how did he know?

“In case you weren’t well enough to see properly,” Loki said, small and quiet, “those--creatures--that I stood next to? They were pointing their weapons at me.”

Blinking, Thor shifted to get a better look at his brother, but the shadows persisted.

“If I had moved even one step towards you, they would have killed me.” Loki paused, and a laugh puffed into the air, shadowed and empty as his face. “You should be glad I have more restraint than you do--if I’d reacted the way I wanted to, he would’ve seen how much I cared and hurt you all the more for it.”

Thor felt like the world was inverting itself all over again, but this time, it wasn’t because of any pain or dizziness. “What?”

“Do you truly think me so evil?” Loki said, and his voice wavered with what sounded like hurt. “Did you think all he had to do was ask it of me, and I would let him torture you? That I would hand over the Tesseract as if the ruin of the universe means nothing at all to me?”

Thor’s eyelashes fluttered as he tried to make sense of this new Loki, one who apparently hadn’t betrayed him. “Then why did you give it to him?” he asked.

“Is it not obvious?”

It wasn’t. Thor sat back and stared at Loki, waiting for an answer.

Ages passed. At last, the silhouette of Loki’s head turned, showing Thor a perfect profile of his face. “Because,” Loki said in a whisper, “I knew I could only watch him hurt you for so long.”

Stunned, Thor stared at his brother for the longest time and waited for the blow to come, for the axe to fall and destroy the hope blossoming in his chest. Not hope for Midgard or any of the realms, but hope for _them_ \--for the sincere return of his brother. When nothing came to contradict what Loki had said, Thor sucked in a breath and let the tears gathered in his eye fall.

Maybe he should have guessed at why Thanos would call his brother to watch him be tortured. Or maybe he could have wondered longer at why Loki shared this cell with him. He hadn’t done either of those things; instead, he’d jumped to the conclusion that Loki had betrayed him.

And yet, somehow, it hurt more to know that Loki was as helplessly stranded as he was.

“Norns,” Thor said and rested his head against the door behind him. “I’ve made an ass of myself, haven’t I?”

Loki huffed a relieved laugh that a little too breathy to be joyful. “Well, you do that a lot,” he said, and Thor relaxed at the sound of his teasing. “Besides,” he continued, “can I blame you for that assumption? After . . . after everything I’ve done, it wouldn’t be so surprising for me to do this as well, would it? You’re entitled to suspect me.”

“No, I’m not,” Thor said, sure of himself.

“No?”

“You’ve done terrible things,” Thor said, shrugging his shoulder and wincing at the way his sore muscles stretched, “but you’re a far cry from Thanos, Loki. I cannot easily see you doing the things he plans to do simply for sadistic satisfaction. That’s . . . why, I think, the thought that you’d betrayed me had me so upset.”

For another uncomfortable stretch of time, Loki said nothing. Then he shifted again, his fingers locking once more in sight over his knees, knuckles paling with his stiff grip. “Thor?”

Thor squinted. “Hmm?”

“You should move away,” Loki said, “from the door, I mean. When they come back, it’s better to have enough time to stand.”

As far as Thor knew, they’d barely been captured for a couple hours, and yet Loki acted as though he’d dwelled in this cell for months, knowing the in’s and the out’s and the rites of passage. It was unsettling. However, the suggestion made perfect sense--imagining the underlings of Thanos rough-handling him to his feet made him cringe--so Thor nodded and went to push himself up.

He got as far as halfway, before the throbbing seemed to stab straight through his eye, piercing him with a startled moan of pain. Cradling the eyepatch, Thor sank again to the floor and struggled to breathe slowly. He didn’t know how he’d managed to stand before.

On the other side of the room, in the farthest corner, Thor could hear his brother shift, as if Loki didn’t know what to do.

Thor swallowed his pride. “I think I’m going to need some help.”

…

Together they heaved Thor over to the other side of the room. Every other step, Thor’s knees would buckle under his weight and rely entirely on Loki’s arm hoisting him up by the waist. It took everything in Loki to breathe, to keep his mind fixed on the present and _not_ on what it’d been like alone years ago--

 _his mind fragile and brittle and ready to crack, fingers clawing across a grimy cold floor to reach the other side, just so he could curl up with his back to the wall_ \--

He shook the thought free and lowered his brother against the wall.

“There,” Loki said and wiped his hands on the sides of his pants, as if he had any hope of escaping the dirt and the blood and the grime. “Even if you can’t get up, at least your back isn’t to them.”

Against the wall, Thor looked rather shell-shocked, his one eye glassy as it stared at the door, his hands clenching and flexing as if gearing for a fight. Ignoring the fact that he had no hope of standing when Thanos’s brutes returned to take him.

Loki pressed his lips together, wishing he could trade something, anything, to set his brother free of this trauma.

“Are you alright?” Thor asked, his eye narrowing.

Before Thor could get a good look, Loki whirled around to sit beside Thor and simply nodded his head once. It wasn’t enough. Thor’s gaze lingered on him, concern radiating from his presence, and Loki felt naked before him. All of his pain and vulnerability leaked into the very essence of the cell--all the way from the collapsing pillar to the grimy, cold floor to the pools of vomit near the door. He was laid bare in this place, even though Thor couldn’t possibly know.

And before Thor could figure it out, Loki reached for Thor’s shoulders. “Here, lay down,” he said and encouraged Thor’s head into his lap. He watched carefully, when Thor’s face went a palish green, and waited to make sure Thor wouldn’t start heaving again.

A part of him longed to relish this, to find satisfaction in the fact that Thor now knew how it felt--but that longing wasn’t successful. There was no satisfaction in this. There was nothing but heartache; Loki knew that if he could somehow take Thor’s place, then he would do it, because Thor, no matter what, didn’t deserve to go through this. No one did but him.

So he twisted his fingers into Thor’s hair and pressed at the pressure points that would ease the lingering pain. At first, Thor flinched and made to scoot away, but Loki held him in place. “Stay still,” he said, “and try to relax.”

Loki expected an argument at that, but Thor seemed to trust him now.

Shoulders shaking, Loki closed his eyes and dug fingers into Thor’s skull, loosening tendrils of his magic as a balm to the carnage Thanos had made with his. It was quick work to massage the tension out of Thor’s neck, for his one good eye to close and his frown to fade. After all, Loki had an abundance of practice.

“How do you know to do this?” Thor asked after a while.

Loki considered his answer. “Trial and error.”

Thor hummed in acknowledgment, and Loki waited. It took no longer than a moment for Thor to hear the hidden meaning; his eye shot open and focused on Loki, narrowing with worry. “Are you . . . When did you . . .”

Silent, Loki focused on rubbing his thumbs into the flesh behind Thor’s ears.

“Before Midgard,” Thor eventually said, gaze clouding over. “After you . . . fell.”

“Yes,” Loki said, because there was no point denying it now.

Thor pushed Loki’s hands away and sat up, wincing at the movement but persisting. It was so Thor--to ignore his own pain to the point of stupidity, merely because he was worried about something long past.

Struggling not to shrink, Loki met his gaze with a set jaw. “It doesn’t change anything.”

Thor frowned like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. Instead his hands clenched into fists, and he set a glare upon the door, as if he could see through metal and stone all the way to wherever Thanos was--sitting on his throne maybe, looking out across the stars and considering which ones to ravage into extinction. Thor would stand no chance against Thanos, but something in Loki rioted to know that his brother would try, for his sake.

Overcome, Loki pressed his lips together so hard that they burned between his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Thor said. His fists were shaking.

It hurt to part his lips, to speak. “What could you possibly have to be sorry for?”

“I thought you were dead,” Thor breathed, ragged and raging.

Loki stilled.

“I thought . . . I was sure that you had died in the void,” Thor went on, “and I didn’t look for you, I didn’t even try. And--you were here, all alone-- _suffering_ .” Thor choked on the word, and his fists rose as if they sought a target and finding none, they hung in the air, trembling with might. “And when you came back--to Midgard--I didn’t question it . . . I took forever to even question it _now_.”

Heart thumping, Loki sat frozen in place. These were words he’d always wanted to hear, somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, and now that he was hearing them, he didn’t know how to feel, how to think. There was no relief, no triumph--only a numbing emptiness that stole all life from Loki’s body, leaving him a barren shell.

On the nights filled with agony, Loki remembered screaming Thor’s name. He remembered clinging onto the last shreds of his sanity, because he foolishly held himself to Thor’s standard. Thor, he had thought, wouldn’t break from any amount of torture. Thor, he had told himself, would endure all pain, like a true hero, never flinching, never wailing.

But Loki had been wrong. Under the weight of Thanos’s power, Thor hadn’t taken any longer than Loki had to scream.

Maybe Thor would never be convinced to attack Midgard, but he had still been driven to do un-Thor-like things. Like vomiting brokenly on all fours, trying not to cry, or like asking for Loki’s help in order to stand and walk a few paces.

In part, it made Loki pity the image of himself curling and crying on the floor of a cell much less.

Yet it also made everything heavier. If Thor was powerless now, then Loki had to admit he’d been just as powerless years ago. If Thor was a victim to Thanos’s whims, then there was no pretending Loki hadn’t been one as well.

Loki blinked at the epiphany and folded his arms around his chest. The weight of the universe crashed in on him and filled his lungs with lead, because there was nothing-- _nothing_ \--that either of them could do but sit here and wait to be made into pawns.

“Loki?”

At the sound of his brother’s voice, Loki realized how close he was to hyperventilating. He closed his eyes and shook himself of the panic. “You had no way of knowing,” he forced himself to say. “You did what you thought was best with the knowledge you had, and there’s no use apologizing for it now. The past is the past.”

He opened his eyes and found Thor staring at him with an expression of worry, one hand outreached, fingers spread, as if he wanted to touch but was afraid to find empty air sitting where Loki sat.

Loki shifted, so that his shoulder brushed lightly along the tip of Thor’s thumb, and that was all it took for Thor’s hand to close around his shoulder and squeeze comfort into Loki’s soul--Loki breathed in deeply and wished, more than anything, that they could stay like this in lieu of facing their fate.

“I wish,” Thor said, voice uncharacteristically soft, “that I could have been there for you.”

Loki swallowed. He wished so, too.

“And I am grateful that you are here for me now.”

At that, Loki leaned into Thor’s side and rested his head on Thor’s shoulder. Thor’s blond hair pressed against Loki’s ear, and Loki closed his eyes, relishing the faint smell of a storm--lightning and thunder and ash raining from the heavens and soaking the ground with an intoxicating, earthy bliss. It was the smell of home, the smell of Asgard, and Thor kept it alive with his heartbeat.

If there was one thing, in the entire universe, that could stop Thanos, then it was this smell, this unstoppable force, this truth. The person Loki sat right next to. Inklings of thought merged into a plan, and Loki lifted his head to stare at the door ahead of them.

For the first time, he dared to hope.

“Thor?”

Thor looked at him. “Hmm?”

“I’m going to get you out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for not editing/revising the way I usually do. Hopefully it turned out okay haha.
> 
> Feel free to follow me on tumblr :) My username is [Loxxxlay](http://loxxxlay.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki executes his plan for them to escape. Thor disagrees with most of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three Things, in order of importance
> 
> Thing #1: Even though I had more planned while writing, the first chapter was meant to stand alone. :( I was really hesitant to write more because of this. So, idk, consider these new chapters as unofficial, self-indulgent, bonus chapters. If you hate them, then pretend they don’t exist. :D
> 
> Thing #2: [Kinda Spoilery] I swear on my life, no named character is gonna die in this. Not even temporarily. I am not the MCU. No matter what happens, no matter what any character thinks is gonna happen, I promise you Thor and Loki won't die. (I can’t, however, promise that unnamed characters won’t die >.> There is a lot of fighting in this chapter lol R.I.P.)
> 
> Thing #3: I’ll feel weird if I don’t say this, so - I wrote a majority of this chapter looooong before that night I had a huge panic attack. >.> In fact, I was daydreaming Thor like this before even returning to tumblr. So honestly, no, I not projecting on Thor. (Tbqh, _he_ was projecting on _me_ , gdi D:) And if anyone doesn’t believe me and calls this OOC because of it, then welp, that’s what I get for oversharing my feelings online I guess. :P
> 
> Anyway ^_^ Enjoy :) :) :)
> 
> ~~You’re all about to hate me~~

 

His plan would only work once.

Their single advantage was that Thanos wouldn’t expect them to resist. There was no way to fight him in their current states—Loki, barred from his magic, and Thor, barely able to stand. They were stranded in space with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Or so Thanos thought.

If he’d been alone, Loki would have curled into a ball on the floor and waited, either to be tortured or to die. It was how it’d been the last time. Thanos and his underlings had broken the fight out of him until he was too tired and timid to do anything but what they commanded. But Loki wasn’t alone this time. This time, Loki could be brave.

It was Thanos’s one and only mistake: putting the two of them together.

He wouldn’t make the mistake twice.

Loki huddled in the corner closest to the door, knees tucked to his chest, arms crammed at his side, and hand curled around the sharpest piece of rock he could find. He focused his hearing on the sounds outside of the cell, tensing at each passing set of footsteps until they marched away. Ahead of him, where Loki had left him, Thor sat, his eye darting between him, the door, and the space separating them. Thor’s hands were clenched into fists and shaking a little. Loki pretended not to notice; his own hands were shaking as well.

“Do you think—”

“Shh,” Loki said. He wouldn’t be able to hear the footsteps over Thor’s voice.

Thor’s boot shifted, knocking over a fragment of rubble. “But if they—”

“Shh. Just wait.”

Though frowning, Thor went quiet. Loki figured the silence would only be good for another five minutes at most, but luckily he didn’t have to find out. Just then, outside the door and down the corridor, were footsteps that were different than the others. They were not the footsteps of a common passerby or patrol, no; they were the footsteps of those with purpose.

His veins pulsed with sudden adrenaline. His hands stop shaking. “Now,” he whispered to Thor, and Thor’s expression cleared of doubt.

Immediately, Thor threw himself onto his side and pretended to cry out in pain.

It sounded a little too breathy to be completely faked, and Loki cringed with sympathy for him. He waited another second, as the footsteps drew nearer and Thor made the sounds of writhing on the ground to add authenticity, before Loki dared to use what precious little magic he had snuck from Thanos’s notice.

As he cast, the binding spells stretched like elastic, threatening to snap, but the illusion came without trouble. A double of himself woven into the air atop Thor, bony fingers curled around Thor’s neck and knees pressing into Thor’s wrists. Thor played his part well, struggling in just the right places as if his limbs and neck really were forced to the ground.

They’d had done this before, of course, in their youth. Not their favorite ruse, but well-practiced enough.

Loki ensured the illusion’s perfection, even as the weight of the spell strained on his heart and lungs. The binding on his magic had stolen more from him than he’d thought. He would only be able to hold the illusion for a moment.

The door slid open.

Luckily it wasn’t any of the Black Order, or other trusted, powerful underlings. It was a mere two of his foot soldiers. Having not expected the scene, they rushed forward to free Thor from Loki’s double. The real Loki waited while they passed him, until they were within arm’s reach of his brother.

Just as their hands went through the illusion, Loki sprung to his feet.

While his double shimmered away in a bright green light, while the two creatures stood confused, Loki struck. He jammed the rock under the closest one’s helmet, right into its neck. The creature grunted in pain, arm flying to the wound and body whirling towards Loki—which was exactly what Loki was waiting for. With a sharp breath, he slammed his elbow into the creature’s face as hard as he could.

Its nose made a sharp cracking noise as it impaled into the soft tissue of brain, and the creature dropped, lifeless.

Before Loki could deal with the second creature, arms locked around his elbows, pulling him back, and Loki couldn’t break free. He hadn’t expected a third, hadn’t heard its presence outside the cell. Its breath warmed the back of Loki’s neck, raising every fiber of his hair in fear—if they weren’t able to get out of here—if their plan was derailed before it ever began—

The second creature punched him in the face, and Loki saw stars. Another blow imploded into his stomach.

Lungs emptied, Loki was barely able to blink, when he heard the pummel of flesh against flesh and saw the second creature go down. Thor was on his feet, one of his fists in the air, knuckles bleeding freely. Thrumming with electricity, Thor reached out with his uninjured hand towards the creature holding Loki. His brow smoothed with the focus of his power.

Loki was about to shout— _no, stop_ —but he couldn’t find his voice.

The lightning buzzing around Thor’s hands cut off abruptly.

Thor’s legs buckled, and he collapsed to his knees. His hands flew to his head, and a gut-wrenching cry roared through the cell.

Though sympathetic, Loki had expected this.

The creature holding him had not.

Praying no one else had heard Thor scream, Loki jammed his elbow into the creature’s gut. Its grip on him slackened, and Loki jerked free. Lungs pumping, Loki kicked the creature between the legs, and when its spine curled with pain, he thrust his knee into its head.

Somehow, the creature had enough consciousness to reach for a weapon at its belt, and Loki’s heart skipped as he heard the thrum of a gun powering up. If it fired—if the blast struck him—if he couldn’t fight—panicked, Loki barreled into the creature, both of them going down and the weapon skidding across the floor. Too winded to punch, Loki clawed at the creature’s eyes.

When its struggles weakened, Loki attached both of his hands to either side of its head. A roar slipped through his throat as he twisted, twisted, twisted—until the force finally broke the creature’s neck.

Loki gasped.

His fingertips were covered in black, thick sludge—blood. He wiped them as best he could on the creature’s armor, but inky stains remained, painting his pale skin. His heart was battering against his chest, and his nose flared with pain. It took everything in him to inhale breaths that weren’t shallow and short.

It had been a gamble.

If Thanos had been a little less confident and sent one of the powerful Black Order instead—if either he or Thor had been just a little slower, a little weaker to strike—Loki swallowed. No. It didn’t matter. They’d won. They’d keep winning, all the way until Thor was free of this terrible place. They had no other choice.

With the back of his hand, he wiped the sweat from his brow, breathed in deep, and turned to check on his brother.

Thor’s head was cradled in his arms, pressed to the ground. He was panting, hard.

Loki pushed himself off the corpse beneath him and crawled closer. Seeing Thor, curled like that, breathing like that, lodged in Loki’s veins like ice. He remembered—he remembered how it felt, trying to use magic after Thanos had twisted and shredded the synapses in his mind. The terror that his magic would be gone forever. All things considered, at least Thor wasn’t puking again.

Gently, Loki rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You alright?”

Thor huffed a ragged breath. His voice sounded shrill, panicked. “The—the lightning. I can’t—”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“No,” Thor breathed. He released his head and righted himself, but his eye—his eye was wide and fearful in a way that was so unlike Thor that Loki felt a surge of fear coarse through him as well. Thor stared at his hands. “Something—he, Thanos, he did something to it. I can’t—I can’t use my power anymore—”

“Thor,” Loki cut in before his brother could work them _both_ into a panic. “You’re going to be fine. It’ll come back eventually, just let it be for now.”

Thor shook his head. “How can you be sure?”

Loki tightened his grip on Thor’s shoulder. “I’m sure. Just trust me.”

Though he didn’t look entirely convinced, Thor clenched his jaw and nodded once.

With that, Loki grabbed the gun discarded on the floor and placed it in his brother’s hand. Then he unbuckled two more guns from the other corpses, thanking the Norns that the fight had ended before either gun could have been used.

Outside of the cell, both ways down the dim corridor, there was stillness. Blessedly, no one had heard them fighting. No one knew they were free.

They’d been lucky.

Loki doubted their luck would hold. They had to hurry.

He stepped back inside the cell and looked his brother over. Blood covered the back of Thor’s hand at the knuckles, but otherwise, he was uninjured. After kneeling beside Thor and setting the guns on the floor beside them, Loki tore a section from his cape. “Let me see,” he said.

Thor held out his hand, stiff and trembling. Even while Loki tore strips from the section of his cape and wiped his brother’s skin as clean as he could of blood, Thor seemed distracted—alternating between glancing over Loki’s shoulder into the corridor beyond and frowning at Loki’s face.

“We need to find the others,” Thor said, his voice smoother than before but still shaky.

“I sent Banner to Midgard,” Loki said. He tore another section from his cape to use as a bandage. “With the Tesseract. Before Thanos—” Thor jerked at the name, so Loki revised. **“** Before we were captured.”

Thor nodded. “Then we need to find the rest. Val, Heimdall, Korg—”

“Thor,” Loki said, his voice stern. “I don’t know where they are, and we won’t have time to find them.”

Frowning, Thor met his gaze. “You said you knew your way around here.”

“I have a general idea,” Loki said as he wrapped the makeshift bandage around Thor’s knuckles. His brother’s hand still trembled, so Loki curled his fingers around Thor’s wrist to steady him. “I paid attention when I was brought on board, and I saw the hangar and the escape pods, so I know the general direction. I _don’t_ know how to find your friends.” He paused, waiting for an argument, but none came—Thor simply sat, shivering. “The best thing we can do for them,” Loki continued, “is escape. We’ll come back with help to rescue them.”

Thor’s mouth turned downwards at the corners, but still he nodded.

Loki suppressed a breath of relief. It would not take much, he knew, for Thor to get distracted, trying to save everyone at the expense of himself, and Loki could not allow for that kind of thinking. Not this time. No. This time, Loki would be the only one who made the sacrifice, and it would be Thor, who escaped, who lived.

He finished tying the bandage at Thor’s palm and released Thor’s hand.

“So we get to the escape pods, we escape in one of them, and then . . . and then what?” Thor asked.

Loki pressed his lips together. “Does there need to be something more?”

Thor blinked at him. “Yes. This ship was built for war. He’ll—he’ll shoot us. We won’t make it meters into space before he sees us.”

With a shrug, Loki retrieved the guns from the floor beside him, and tucked one of them into the waistband of his pants. He checked the settings on the other to make sure it was at full capacity and ready to fire. “We’re sons of Odin,” he said to Thor, only just wincing at the sentiment. “Space won’t kill us. And it’s certainly better than staying here.”

“What, so we’ll just float along in the cosmos and hope that somebody will find us? Pray that we won’t be assumed dead?”

Loki shrugged again and made to stand.

Thor grabbed Loki’s arm, and Loki could feel the vibrations in Thor’s grip, the way he quivered. “That’s not good enough,” Thor growled. “I won’t leave our lives to chance.”

Nostrils flaring with a sigh, Loki looked into his brother’s single eye. “I still have some magic left,” he said, which was only a lie by omission. “I might be able to cloak the escape pod until it’s a safe distance away. Will that satisfy you?”

Thor considered this and nodded.

“Good,” Loki said. He glanced behind him to find the corridor still empty. “We need to move before they come looking.”

But Thor didn’t release him. Instead, he grabbed the end of Loki’s torn cape and ripped some more of it free. Loki started to ask, when Thor bunched the fabric up and held it to Loki’s nose. “Hold still,” Thor said. “You’re bleeding.”

Loki did hold still, for a moment. Thor cupped the back of his head with one hand, and with the other, he ran the cloth around Loki’s nose, and Loki winced at the bruise forming there. He endured the warmth in Thor’s palms and the gentle circles of the cloth until Thor pulled away, the fabric stained and soiled with both grime and blood. When Thor reached for more of his cape, it became too much.

Tearing out of his grip, Loki stood. “We have to go,” he said quietly, even as freshly leaked blood caked his upper lip. “Can you walk?”

Instead of answering, Thor braced his four limbs on the ground and pushed himself to his feet. He swayed, back and forth, for long enough that Loki nearly went to his side to help—but then Thor rested a hand against the wall behind him and steadied himself. After a moment, dizziness cleared from his face, and he was able to take a solid step forward.

Expression tight, Thor nodded at Loki. “Let’s go.”

...

Even though the fight was long past, Thor couldn’t stop shaking.

They walked through the corridors, Loki leading the way, and Thor knew he should be paying attention to his surroundings, should be asking questions—like what his brother meant only a couple of hours ago when he said he would get _Thor_ out of here, as if he didn’t plan to get out of here himself—but Thor could barely focus. His brain whirred through thoughts too quickly to decipher—fragments of panic that built into a frenzy of adrenaline.

He clenched his hands into fists, digging fingers into his palms, the knuckles on his right hand stinging as they strained—but his hands only trembled more. He folded his arms around himself, and the shaking moved to his shoulders. A peculiar feeling stirred in his chest.

There was something wrong with him, something he had never felt—or at least not like _this_. And he couldn’t identify it, he couldn’t name the feeling. The lack of understanding churned in his stomach, the shaking moving from his chest to his throat.

His teeth started chattering as if he were freezing, and goosebumps raised along his bare arms expressing the adrenaline that _wouldn’t fade_.

He wanted to shout, he wanted to punch something, and he didn't know why.

When he looked up, Loki was staring at him oddly. “Are you cold?”

“No,” Thor said even as a shudder rolled through his spine. But it was true. He wasn’t cold.

Loki continued forward, his eyes pointed on the closed door ahead of them. “I wasn’t lying, you know,” Loki said. “Your power will come back. I promise.”

Thor meant to brush aside the reassurance; instead, his entire body shuddered with a spell of anxiety. Adrenaline surged through his blood, chilling the marrow of his bones, and he folded his arms tighter around himself. He could no longer tell whether the shivering was because he was cold or not.

They stopped at the door with a panel accessible only with a passkey or a code. Loki inspected it for a moment. “We just need to get you off this blasted ship,” he said as he punched in a string of numbers. “Somewhere safe. Then you’ll be able to heal.”

There it was again. The _you_ instead of _us_. Thor wanted to ask, he started to, but his voice was dry and his teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.

The panel flashed red, and Loki cursed to himself. “We’ll have to—” Loki cut off when he saw Thor’s face. “Are you alright?”

The light in the corridor dimmed and swirled.

When Thor failed to speak, Loki touched his arm. “Sit down for a moment. You look pale.”

Thor started to lower himself down, but his adrenaline jolted, his heart braking, threatening to stop. They needed to keep going, keep moving, or else they would be caught, and Thanos would—at the name, his breath caught, his vision blurred into gray—he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe—

“Thor,” Loki said from far away, “sit down.”

The corridor tilted.

After a time, Thor felt a pressure on his wrist, a thumb throbbing with a pulse that wasn’t his. He closed his eye and listened to the familiar heartbeat, letting it give focus to his thoughts and trying to breathe in time with it.

“ . . . it, just breathe. In, and out. In, and out.”

Thor heard himself suck in a lungful of air. At last, his vision began to clear, and he found himself on the ground, propped against the wall, Loki’s face in front of his, drawn tight, but not with concern—with sympathy.

Urgent, Thor exhaled, loudly, and tried to speak over his numbed tongue. “Something’s wrong,” he croaked, but Loki’s face didn’t grow any more worried than before. “I think I'm—” Thor took another breath “—poisoned.”

Loki only stared at him. “You're not poisoned.”

“I have to be,” Thor gasped. “I can barely—barely breathe.”

“You were never poisoned,” Loki said with surety. “I would've noticed.”

Thor shook with renewed vigor, his lungs struggling to expel his blood of this horrid toxin. He glared at Loki, heart hammering. “Then how do you explain this?” he hissed.

Loki sat back on his haunches, his eyes darting once down the corridor before shifting back. “You're not poisoned,” he said, strangely gentle. “ You're just—ah, how can I put this . . .” His forehead wrinkled until he simply sighed and shook his head. “You're just scared.”

The word clenched his chest, like a hand gripping his fluttering heart, smothering his blood flow. “I am not _scared_.”

Loki glanced at him, his face unreadable.

“I would know it if I was,” Thor said, even though he was starting to consider the possibility. He could feel his face flushing red and his ears burning in shame, and it was that which encouraged him to keep arguing. “It doesn’t explain why I nearly fainted just now.”

“Actually it does,” Loki said. His cool hand squeezed Thor’s shoulder. “You’ve been through a lot today. You’ve temporarily lost your power. You were helpless before a great foe, and you’re still very much defenseless.” He paused, and his eyes glazed over for a moment before he blinked the glossiness away. “And yet, despite the danger, you’re trying to pretend like everything is fine . . . It’s only natural your mind would try to warn you in other ways.”

Thor clenched his jaw, no longer able to meet Loki’s gaze. Just by—just by acknowledging this fact, his body had ceased trembling, and his adrenaline was starting to fade, proving Loki right. He sulked at the floor.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Loki said with another glance down the corridor. “It’s a perfectly normal response.”

A fresh wave of heat rushed through Thor’s face. He glared at Loki. “Do not attempt to soothe me with false platitudes,” he said. “If this is so normal, then why aren’t _you_ afraid?”

Loki’s eyelashes fluttered in a series of blinks. He turned his head to the side, and to Thor’s surprise, his brother’s cheeks glowed a light shade of pink. “I . . . I _am_ afraid,” he murmured, barely loud enough to hear. “Quite possibly more so than you.”

Eye squinted in disbelief, Thor stared at his brother.

“I’m just . . .” Loki sighed. “I’ve had more practice with fear than you’ve had, Thor. That’s all.”

Thor swallowed. Even though he’d mostly calmed, his hands were still shaking, and he needed to move past this. They needed to keep going, and Thor couldn't afford to react this way whenever they ran into a fight. He needed . . . help. And, well, Loki had already seen him weak and helpless on all fours, nearly crying—was this truly so much worse?

He inhaled a short breath. “How do you—how do you deal with it then?”

Loki shot him a startled look, and Thor waited for all the ways Loki could use the question to torment him, to tease him, but the cruelty never came.

Instead, Loki’s brow furrowed for a moment before he answered. “Well. I guess it helps to think of the worst possible outcome, and acknowledge it.” He paused, tapping his lower lip as he thought. “Your power for instance—maybe it never returns. That would certainly be unfortunate, but it won’t be the end of the world. You’re quite strong without it.”

Nodding, Thor considered that fear and that possibility. His hands did still, for a moment, but then they continued trembling, his heart starting to pound again. “That’s not it. Not completely.”

“Alright. Then maybe it’s that you won’t escape,” Loki said and paused, to inhale and exhale. “That you’ll—that you’ll die here.”

At that moment, understanding washed over Thor like a bucket of cold water. His hands froze with deadly stillness, and his heart rate rested. It was as if all the fear had been doused like a flame, and instead transformed into a lump in his throat and a burning in his sinuses. He grew conscious of Loki’s hand, still cool against the skin of his shoulder, and the green sparkle in Loki’s eyes.

“That’s not the worst outcome,” Thor said.

“No?”

Thor’s jaw worked to give voice to his truest, deepest fear. “The worst possible outcome is that I get out of here and you don’t.”

Silence fell.

Loki’s hand slipped away from Thor’s shoulder, and his expression closed off.

It was enough to confirm Thor’s suspicion, to reawaken that fear. This time, it didn’t tremble through his limbs or arrest his heart; it throbbed through his mind, the images of Loki alone and dead at Thanos’s feet. Dead for real.

At that moment, he hated Loki— _hated_ him—for not treasuring his own life.

“Thor . . .”

“Don’t,” Thor said tightly. His throat ached. “Don’t act like you haven’t been planning to abandon me from the moment we plotted to escape our cell.”

Loki choked a laugh that sounded satisfyingly miserable. “I don’t _want_ to abandon you.”

“Then _don’t_.”

“It might not be so simple.”

“Loki,” Thor said and grabbed his brother by both arms. He remembered Loki’s face, tear stricken and eyes wild, growing smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the wormhole of space—where Thor now knew he had been tortured, just like this. He clenched his jaw and waited until Loki’s vivid green eyes were latched with his. “It’s either both of us or none of us. Do you understand me?”

“Thor, I can’t just—”

“Both of us,” Thor repeated, slowly, “or none of us. Promise.”

Loki’s mouth thinned as he swallowed, and tears brimmed in his eyes. He stared at Thor for a long time before his lips finally parted. “I promise,” he said.

Thor believed him.

It was as if the weight on his shoulders had drained away, and his thoughts sharpened into something, clearer, fiercer. They were going to get out of here. Together.

Conscious of Loki’s gaze upon him, Thor studied the door with the unsolved code panel and then looked at the ceiling. A few paces away, directly above, was an air vent. Those would be all throughout the ship—possibly even in the cells—to make sure airflow was properly conducted. As the possibilities expanded, Thor felt a feral smile spread across his face.

“What is it?” Loki asked, his voice threaded with anxiety.

Thor pointed at the vent.

Upon looking, Loki’s expression relaxed. “Ah,” he said and smiled, too. “It would seem you’re not as hopeless as we thought.”

…

Getting in was hard. Crawling through the vents was harder. There was so little space to maneuver that they had to nearly press their chests to the ground and shuffle forward rather than crawl. If they were caught, then there’d be no hope of defending themselves—squashed into the narrow vent paths, they were sitting ducks.

Loki, being slightly smaller and more knowledgeable about the layout of the ship, went first, with Thor following closely behind him.

He focused on what Loki had said, to face the fear, rather than deny it—and face it he did.

Every time one of the metal panels creaked under their weight, every time a whiff of ventilated air reeked of fresh blood, every time he heard footsteps in the corridor beneath them, every time he so much as _thought_ about his power or Thanos or the people of Asgard, Thor quivered like a child until he rehearsed Loki’s promise in his head.

Dying would be easy. One last breath, and it would be over.

Living without Loki—that was something he wasn’t sure he could do a third time. He’d barely done it twice, and that was before Loki had become the sole survivor of his family. In many ways, Loki was all Thor had left.

Maybe a part of him wanted to fail. To be trapped here with his brother, either dead or alive, but together. And maybe that was why he was so easily halted in his tracks by the faint scream he heard ahead. A child’s scream, the scream of a young girl. Thor stopped shuffling forward to listen closer. Up ahead, Loki stopped as well and his spine went rigid—his brother could hear the girl screaming too.

Loki’s body pressed against the wall so that he could duck his head and meet Thor’s gaze.

“Go towards it,” Thor ordered.

Loki’s eyes strained. “We need to turn right up here.”

“Go towards that sound,” Thor repeated.

“Thor,” Loki said, soft and low. He didn’t move.

Thor grit his teeth, and curled his fingers around the edge of the ceiling panel beneath him. He pulled on it, with all his might, his pulse reverberating through his skull, but it wouldn’t budge. His elbows were in the way.

“What are you doing?” Loki asked.

Without answering, Thor scooted backwards to give his elbows more room.

“Thor, stop it,” Loki said. “You can’t just go after—whoever it is—”

Thor managed to lift the panel a couple of inches, enough to reveal the corridor beneath them. The girl’s scream strengthened in volume, getting closer, and a cacophony of other voices of terror mingled with hers.

“—There will _always_ be someone screaming,” Loki was saying. “Even if you manage to save her, there will be another to replace her. He will never stop. Not unless—not unless you’re able to _escape_. To renew your strength, and—” He paused as Thor scooted further back to remove the ceiling panel entirely. “Thor, are you listening to me?”

Thor met Loki’s gaze. “I’m listening,” he said.

“Then you know we can’t help,” Loki said. “They’ll check our cell any moment. The alarm will go off, and we’ll be no better off than her unless we _keep moving_.”

Abruptly, the screaming stopped.

Thor frowned at the empty corridor below, at the sickly purple lights haunting the metal walls. He could’ve sworn the screaming had been coming closer, but he couldn’t hear it anymore. He had no way of knowing which way to look.

Instead, he glanced at Loki, who had somehow managed to cram himself nearly all the way around. His tongue darted out to lick his lips, and his eyes darted between the floor panel and Thor’s face, while they waited for the screaming to start again.

When it didn’t, Loki visibly exhaled. “See?” he said. “You can’t save everyone. Come on.”

Just then, Thor heard the swoosh of a door sliding open. Hard footsteps pounded against the floor of the ship, and—amidst the repetitive _thud, thud, thud_ , there was that same child’s voice, not screaming, but weeping tears, mumbling pleas for her mother.

Thor peered as close as he dared into the corridor and counted a total of ten figures, not including the small group of Aesir huddled in the center. Teeth gritted, Thor gauged the pain in his head, the aching in his body, and the dizziness lurking on the edge of his consciousness.

It was his deepest instincts that told him he wouldn’t win this fight. Not like this. Not without Loki’s help.

“Don’t do it,” Loki whispered. “We can come back for them. After.”

Ignoring his brother, Thor reached for the gun tucked at his waist. As the group of Thanos’s underlings approached the space directly under him, he waited for just the right moment.

“Thor, please. Don’t.”

Thor gave his brother a tired smile. “I have to,” he said and dropped.

He landed on one of them, crushing the guard to the floor. Even with a body to cushion him, Thor still felt his landing slam through both of his legs, all the way up to his shoulders. His head lurched with pain, the corridor spun, and the edges of his vision darkened.

Thor sucked in a lungful of air to keep from fainting, and swung his fist at the shadowy silhouette charging him.

His wounded knuckles made contact. Pain shot through his hand, and his lungs jolted from the lack of air. Thor stumbled sideways. His elbow hit the floor, and he hadn’t even realized he’d been falling.

The hostile shadows swarmed around him, and Thor at last found it in himself to regret this decision. Wherever Loki was, he wasn’t helping—Thor was on his own.

One of the shadows moved to kick him, and Thor braced himself for a blow to his ribcage.

It never came.

Uneasy, Thor opened his eye to find the corpse of the shadow lying on the ground. A second shadow came after him, but it too went down from the blast of a gun. Thor blinked rapidly, his vision clearing just enough to see Loki poised in the ventilation shaft, one of the guns he’d stolen trained on the next target.

Even though Thor’s entire body ached, he couldn’t help but sigh in relief.

Renewed, Thor surged to his feet and attacked the next creature within reach. He swung his fists, using the lure of gravity to strengthen his blows where he could. Loki fired at the ones Thor couldn’t dodge, until there were only three of them left, and the Aesir were pressed safely against the wall.

Upon seeing their defeat, the remaining creatures started to run. Loki’s words were fresh on his mind—any one of them could sound an alarm and make it that much harder to escape this place.

Desperate, Thor barreled into one, bringing them both to the ground.

Behind him, he heard the crash of one body into another.

He whirled—his vision blurring with the movement—to see Loki, having taken down one, aim at the last.

Too late.

A shrill alarm rang through the corridor, reverberating against the metal walls, and piercing Thor’s ears. The purple lights flashed red. As his head throbbed in time with the sound, Thor cringed, pressing his hands to his ears. He was barely conscious of the sound of Loki’s gun firing at the culprit and the thud of a body hitting the ground.

“Damn it,” Loki hissed.

Thor forced his eye to open so he could see his brother clearly. Loki’s eyebrows hiked on his forehead, and his teeth were ground together, jaw clenched so tight it was almost shaking. It was the most open display of fear Thor had seen on his brother’s face since the moment Thanos’s ship had arrived to capture them.

The second Loki caught Thor’s gaze upon him, the expression cleared and his features returned to the stoic blankness. “We need to get out of here,” Loki told Thor. “Now.”

Thor couldn’t agree more. While his brother snatched a passkey from the corpse of one of the creatures, Thor gathered the frightened Aesir in front of him. “Listen,” he told them, and waited until all pairs of eyes fell on him. “Our plan is to find the escape pods and evacuate to the nearest planet. You are more than welcome to join us.”

The little girl let out a muffled wail from behind her hands. “What about my mother?”

Softening, Thor knelt before her, and held both of her shoulders in his hands. “We’ll return for your mother,” he said, giving her his most reassuring smile. “We just need to get out of here so that we can find some help.”

“And how will we escape notice?” another woman asked. “He’ll shoot us out of the sky.” Thor looked at the woman, who was not a child but still young of age. Ash covered her forehead and cheekbones, and there was a bruise swelling around her eye. Her arm was wrapped around an elder’s waist, supporting him.

Thor released the child and stood to face her. “My brother has a plan for that.” He looked over his shoulder. “Loki?”

At Thor’s call, Loki tore himself away from the door and threw the passkey to the floor. “It doesn’t work anymore,” Loki said over the sound of the alarm, his nostrils flaring.

“That’s fine,” Thor said. “We’ll just go back to the vents. We’re close now, aren’t we?”

“It’s not that.” Loki’s hands curled into fists, and his feet angled away from Thor, tapping restlessly, like he was ready to run. “If the doors are locked, then the escape pods likely won’t detach from the ship. Not without pre-existing authorization—authorization we won’t have, unless one of us finds a control room.”

Thor frowned. He saw where Loki was going with this, so he gripped Loki’s arm and steered him closer. “You’re staying with me,” he warned.

Loki’s lips spread into an unhappy line. “Someone needs to go to the control room, Thor.”

Thor’s grip tightened, and he shook his brother, if only slightly. “We need you,” Thor said. “We need your magic to cloak the escape pod from his notice. Otherwise, we won’t make it.” He waved at the group of waiting Aesir. “He’ll shoot us, and they’ll all die.”

For a moment, Loki’s face went tight, and Thor was ready to drag them both back to their cell if only it meant Loki wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t try to sacrifice himself just so that Thor and the others could escape. But just as quickly, Loki’s expression relaxed, and he smiled at Thor and nodded reassurance to the Aesir looking on.

“I know you need me,” Loki said quietly to Thor. “That’s why you can trust me to come back.”

Thor’s chest rioted. He grabbed Loki’s other arm, just to be safe. “No—”

“The hangar should be a straight shot from here. So you lead them to the escape pod,” Loki said, as if Thor wasn’t holding him like a madman, “and I’ll go to a control room. I’ll give the escape pod authorization to detach, and then I’ll meet you there.”

Wild and shaking, Thor shook his head. “No, _I_ will go to a control room. Just tell me where one is.”

“Thor,” Loki said, his voice surging with confidence. “I’m quicker than you, I know Thanos more than you do, and I’m better at stealth. If you go, we’ll fail. This is how we succeed.”

Even while glaring at his brother, Thor tried to believe Loki, and there were plenty of reasons to. Loki had promised, for one. It was no lie that they would need Loki’s magic in order to escape. And it was true, that Loki was the best option for the task at hand. Yet his heart told him not to let Loki out of his sight, not for anything. He was torn, between the two forces, reason versus instinct, and he didn’t know which was right.

“Promise you’ll come find me,” Thor said.

“I already promised you we’d leave together or not at all,” Loki said.  “Do you want me to swear again?”

Thor swallowed. “Yes.”

For a while, Loki simply stood in Thor’s grasp, smiling with a fondness that felt out of place here, amidst the black blood splattered against the floor and gruesome remains of battle. Then Loki sighed and lifted his hands to either side of Thor’s head. With closed eyes, Loki cupped his palms around Thor’s jaw, and his fingers lit with a green aurora that radiated warmth.

Thor nearly flinched away, but the spell finished before he could move. “What was that?”

Loki’s eyes opened. “It’s a locator spell—so I can find you later,” he said. “Because I _will_ find you later. I promise.”

Overcome, Thor surged forward and pressed Loki into an embrace. He tucked his head against the leather guards at Loki’s shoulder and pressed his nose against the silky black curls of Loki’s hair. He breathed in Loki’s scent, memorizing every last detail, just in case.

No. Not in case. Because Loki had promised.

“This isn’t goodbye,” Thor said, almost a question.

“No.” Loki squeezed his arms around Thor’s torso. “It’s not.”

Thor nodded slowly. With apprehension, he released his grip on Loki’s arms and watched as Loki stayed put, not running away, not vanishing in a poof of light, but staying at Thor’s side. Promising to escape with them, after only a brief interlude.

He believed Loki.

When he scanned the waiting Aesir, Thor saw that they, too, had been reassured by Loki’s promises and plans. The doubt in their faces had transformed into courage and ferocity. Even the child’s hands were clenched at her sides, her lips pressed together with a calm determination.

“Alright,” Loki said with a deep breath. “Let’s get everyone in the vents before we’re caught here.”

…

Unbeknownst to Thor, Loki watched his brother go. It was hard to see him beyond the Aesir clamoring through the vents after him, but he caught glimpses of the glint of Thor’s eyepatch, and his solid armored boots. Slowly, the lot of them became smaller and smaller, until Loki was left with flickers at the edges of his vision, of a red cape or braided blonde hair—images that proved they were phantoms.

It was goodbye.

Loki had known this since the alarms had gone off, sealing the escape pods from detachment. In truth, he’d known from the very beginning that the last reserves of his magic would never cloak an entire escape pod from Thanos’s gaze, that one of them would have to stay behind and find another plan, a better plan that would keep Thor from falling to the void of space forever.

Yes, he’d been planning to sacrifice himself for his brother all along.

It had been easy to find hope in Thor’s voice and cling to it, like a mirage of water amidst a sea of sand—but here, in the solitude of Thanos’s ship, Loki knew one truth with utter certainty: he was going to die.

There was no way around it. He had nothing left to bargain, no use left to Thanos, and nowhere to hide. And even as the fear crept into him, cramping his muscles as he crawled through the vents searching for a control room, Loki felt at peace with this fact. He had nothing else to lose. Nothing but Thor.

So there was nothing to divide his attention from the singular purpose left to him: to get Thor off this ship.

After precious minutes of crawling around and peering between the gaps of every air vent, Loki at last found a control room relatively sparse of many operatives. He counted three, each attached to a separate screen. Their heads were hunched over, and their eyes were glued to their tasks—which, Loki noted with a breath of approval, were flipping through security screens scattered all across the ship. None of the camera feeds, it seemed, revealed the inner shafts of the ventilation system.

Loki carefully took the gun from his side and situated himself so that he was ready to move. Then he aimed the gun at the creature closest to the door. He would have one shot and one shot only before chaos broke, and then—then it would be up to him alone.

With a deep breath, Loki powered up the gun and fired.

The creature dropped dead, and the other two whirled their heads in confusion.

Loki took the spare couple seconds to slam his fist into the air vent. When it hit the floor, a loud crash reverberated through the control room, and Loki threw himself out of view of the two remaining creatures below. As expected, two bolts of gunfire passed through the empty air he’d left. They scorched the metal above, the sound sizzling, his nose flaring with the scent of burnt steel.

In the moment after they fired, Loki threw himself through the hole. The force of hitting the floor jolted up the bone of his leg, and threw him forward, onto his wrist. Something cracked. Loki had no time to worry—instead, he rolled forward, narrowly dodging the second round of gunfire. One of the blasts made a hole in the remains of his cape, and Loki gasped as the heat seared so near to his arm.

He dove behind one of the screens to get his bearings. His wrist flared in pain, and his foot ached in the same rhythm of his pulse. Maybe they both were broken—but he could manage.

One of the creatures started towards the screen opposite of Loki, likely to send some sort of alarm—Loki shot the screen with a newly powered round of fire.

Then he hurled himself forward, into the creature’s chest.

It reared backwards, but Loki caught its shoulders with one hand and slammed the handle of the gun into its face with his other. As it gurgled a mouthful of blood, Loki twisted, eyes darting for the last, living creature, only to hear the sound of a gun powering up.

His eyes found their target, just as the creature fired.

A blast caught him in the shoulder—Loki cried out in pain, suddenly feeling the throbbing in his wrist vanish. His arm fell useless to his side. His balance skewed.

As the room tilted, Loki lifted his uninjured arm, aimed his gun at the remaining creature’s head, and fired.

The creature went down.

Loki slammed into the floor, shoulder-wound first. A moan swelled through his throat, and his eyes burned with tears. For several long moments, Loki could do nothing but lay there next to the corpses and stare at the ceiling, wondering when the unbearable stinging in his shoulder would stop. He took in breath after breath, until his lungs actually filled, and his eyes stopped burning.

 _Thor_ , he thought. _Thor, Thor, Thor._

Clenching his eyes shut, Loki took one more deep breath, before righting himself. Shoulder hanging limp and foot throbbing, Loki crawled with his two good limbs over to the closest screen. Camera feeds stared back at him, many of them aimed on the escape pods.

 So Thanos had guessed what they were planning.

Loki took a moment to familiarize himself with the buttons, before he pulled up a wide shot of the hangar. On another area of the screen, he pulled up the communications system.

When he found the general transmissions channel, Loki channeled a portion of his remaining magic into it in order to ensure that no one on Thanos’s ship would notice—or so he hoped. Then, he broadcasted an SOS call to any nearby ships. The radar system suggested there were at least two, maybe three—one of them looked like it was an unpiloted cargo ship, but the other two started to ping back, trying to connect.

With an eye on the camera feed, watching for Thor, Loki waited.

Minutes ticked by, but none of them responded, and Loki ran an anxious finger over his lower lip. The magic he’d buried, escaping Thanos’s purge, was running dangerously low, and he knew, deep down, that he had only minutes to spare before someone caught him here.

If Thor took too long . . .

If none of the neighboring ships responded . . .

At that moment, Loki caught a flicker of movement in the camera feed. Eager, Loki flipped through the screens to see Thor and his group of rescued Aesir dashing towards one of the escape pods. Heart racing, Loki zoomed in on the screen to study the number they had chosen. B-13.

He minimized the camera feed and pulled up a screen that could launch them into space. It took a moment to find the one with a matching number, and when he did, his heart stilled and breathing evened.

They were going to make it. They were going to win.

And Thor—Loki smiled sadly, a lump rising in his throat—Thor was going to hate him.

When Loki could no longer see Thor on the camera feed, he unmuted the escape pod, and spoke into the mic. “Thor?”

Thor’s response came immediately. “Loki! We’re here. We’re all in. Are you coming?”

Loki flipped back to the camera feed of the hangar. The Black Order was coming—perhaps they assumed that Thor was trapped, that the escape pod couldn’t launch, for they were taking their time. Ebony Maw’s prowling steps jolted in Loki’s memory, like needles in his brain, and Proxima toyed her trident from hand to hand.

Even if he wanted to, even if he had ever thought it at all possible, there was no way he could make it to Thor now. Not with the Black Order closing in.

Loki’s chest rose and fell with a breath.

Thor’s voice played on the audio. “Loki?”

“I’m sorry,” Loki said and pressed the button to launch.

He could hear the escape pod lurch over the transmission, and he switched the camera feed to one that showed the expanse of space. A distant star burned in the distance, a bright blue circle of pure light—it silhouetted the escape pod as it began to float away.

Thor was shouting at him, _screaming_ at him over the transmission, and Loki couldn’t distinguish the words over the top of the other Aesir in the background, gasping and crying out. For the first time, Loki pitied them, for what was about to happen; he’d had no choice of course—Thor would never have gone through with the plan without them.

He pressed his lips together, feeling them whiten and crack between the pressure of his teeth.

It was as if his life was flashing before his eyes, because even if the time of his death would be several minutes yet, Loki knew _this_ would be the only moment that mattered in the end, these spare few seconds before Thanos could blast the escape pod into rubble, these seconds before Thor’s body would float comatose in space.

His heart pumped, his blood raced, and his lungs emptied and filled.

Thor’s voice was finally starting to stabilize, as the Aesir with him went quiet. “You _promised_ ,” he was saying, between ragged breaths, “you promised, and—and _I believed you_!”

Loki winced. The lump in his throat grew, and his vision blurred, and this—this wasn’t how he wanted these precious few seconds to go. This wasn’t what he wanted Thor’s last memory of him to be. Loki heaved in a breath to block the surging sob, and he leaned into the mic.

“Thor,” he said loudly, “listen to me. Listen.”

At once, Thor went silent. Surprisingly so.

Maybe he knew that this would be the last time they would ever speak.

Loki’s chest ached. He could hear Thor’s heavy breathing. “There’s—there’s something I need to tell you,” Loki said. His eyes were glued to the camera feed of the escape pod, drifting away, further and further, and it would be within reach of the ship’s canons at any moment.

And yet, Loki suddenly found himself unable to speak.

“What is it?” Thor said, the prior rage in his voice subdued.

Still nothing.

“Loki, tell me.”

Loki’s heart caught in his throat. He could hear Thor panting on the other end, the silence between them stretching into eternity, and Loki swallowed, he filled his lungs, he tried to give voice to the words he needed to say.

His voice cracked when he started to speak. He cleared his throat and tried again.

It was now or never.

“Thor, I—”

The escape pod exploded in a blast of cannon fire. The transmission went dead.

Loki choked on his breath. His chest filled with lead, stinging through his lungs, and he stared blankly at the camera feed, at the remains of the explosion. The graphics were too grainy and choppy to differentiate between slabs of rubble and bodies, floating in space. There was no hope in trying to catch a glimpse of Thor.

Even though he had known the canon would fire, that the escape pod would explode, Loki still stared in shock. His jaw hung open, and his tongue dried mid-sentence.

 _I love you_ , he hadn’t been able to say.

Not that it mattered.

The universe would go on. Planets would continue to orbit their suns and galaxies would continue to expand, leaving more and more to the vacuum of space. Thanos would either end half of humanity or he wouldn’t. And if ( _when_ ) Thor was eventually plucked from space, he would grieve for a time, yes, but eventually he would move on—comforted by the love in Loki’s actions rather than his words.

In the grand scheme of things, those three words mattered very little.

But to Loki—stranded, alone, and about to die if he were lucky—those three words had meant everything. His legacy, his memory, his hope in a world where Thor would live. And he hadn’t been able to say them. Not in time.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, even only to himself.

At that moment, static played on the general transmissions. Immediately, Loki cut off the SOS call and weaved his magic into this single line to keep anyone else from listening. The static crackled for a moment longer, and Loki was afraid he wouldn’t be able to hold the spell long enough, when it finally cleared.

“—are reporting on an SOS call. If you can hear, respond. Over.”

Loki held back a sob of relief. “Yes,” he said into the microphone. “Yes, I can hear you. Over.”

“Do you still need help? Over.”

“We still need help. Hold on, let me get you the coordinates.” In the camera feed, the wreckage of the escape pod was shrinking fast, and Loki scrambled to pull the current coordinates up on the screen. He read them over the transmission as quickly as he dared. “Help them,” he said, “help them please.”

The person on the other end said something, but it crackled between waves of static.

Loki bit his lip, using the last of his magic to strengthen the transmission. “The one with the eyepatch—find him,” he said. “He’ll still be alive.”

“—hello? Did you say—eyepatch—cutting out—”

Panicked, Loki simply read the coordinates again, three times over into the transmission, in case they hadn’t gotten through the first time.

“Coordinates have been received, over.”

Loki breathed in a deep breath. That would have to be enough.

With his magic drained to a mere sliver, Loki steeled himself and said, “Tell him I love him.”

Then the transmission, along with his magic, died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~You probably won't want to after this lol, but~~ feel free to follow me on tumblr, my username is [loxxxlay](http://loxxxlay.tumblr.com) :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor struggles with the loss of his brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure this is not the chapter you guys were wanting, but this is the chapter I wrote, so oh well lol. T_T Loki will return in person next chapter.. which I am saving to write until after the movie comes out.

_Wake._

Thor woke.

His lungs rebelled, spewing the dust of ash and poisonous gas and anything else the emptiness of space contained. Head throbbing and heart pounding, Thor was only aware of the white-hot blare of his senses—he couldn’t control his limbs, couldn’t think, he could only fight for air.

Only when his lungs cleared, enabling him to take a deep breath, did his senses return to him. His hand was clutched around cold metal, and his feet were planted on a sturdy floor. Ahead were four oval windows showcasing a glimpse of wreckage and rubble floating in space.

He’d been plucked from there, surely, where he’d been drifting along with the wreckage as a breathless corpse. He’d been taken into this vessel and he didn’t know whose it was. He didn’t know how long it had been.

There were people behind him, watching. This, Thor knew.

They hadn’t yet attacked, and Thor’s chest stuttered at the idea that they were waiting for him to turn to do so. He waited until his breathing was—mostly—under control before he faced them, mentally preparing himself for combat.

Six of them. A Midgardian, a . . . tree and a rodent, two females and another male. As he stared at them, the female with antennas lifted her hand to wave. The Midgardian smiled **.**

In his current state, Thor wasn’t convinced he could fight them. Something had broken inside him—the surges of lightning were still there but tangled and shredded, and it took everything in him to simply stay standing and grounded. Chills ran down his spine at how helpless he had become, how much his life depended on their _whims_.

When this was over—if it wasn’t already over—he hoped to never feel this way again.

_Loki_ , he thought, and just as quickly smothered the thought of his brother away.

A moment of quiet passed, and they didn’t attack.

Thor swallowed. “Who the hell are you guys?”

…

“So that’s it?” the Midgardian—or Star Lord, he called himself—said.

Thor nodded once.

Star Lord waited for more, but Thor had already told them everything to reasonably explain why he’d been floating in space, if avoiding speaking of Thanos or his brother as much as he could, and he had provided the extra information that they specifically asked. Fortunately, not long had passed before these people had found him in the wreckage—or so they claimed. If Thor could hurry through this conversation, then maybe he still had a chance to stay a step ahead, to find the other Infinity Stones, to stop Thanos.

So Thor sat in silence, waiting for them to dismiss his story. From what he knew of space bandits and outlaws, he didn’t expect much more than finding himself dropped off in the nearest planet system—or rather, he would be lucky if that was what they offered.

It was a shock when Star Lord failed to do so and instead pressed for more information. “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. There’s a weird purple giant after those Infinity Stone things, you managed to escape him—also survived floating in _space_ apparently—but you still didn’t bother to find out where this guy was _going_?”

Confused, Thor stared at the man closer. “Why does it matter to you where he was going?”

“Because we're gonna stop him. Obviously,” Star Lord said.

Thor blinked. He looked all six of them over a second time, noting their attributes with a closer look at their strengths in a fight rather than their weaknesses. The one called Drax looked decently powerful, and the green woman who hadn’t yet said her name stood with the grace of a competent fighter, but—

_Thanos absorbing his lightning without even flinching—_

_Thanos dragging him by the skull, scraping through his mind and ripping the power within apart, until he was a shell, emptied of anything but sheer, flashing pain—_

Thor flinched back into reality and stared at the six of them. “You think you are equipped to handle a being such as he?”

“Well, somebody’s gotta do it,” the racoon said with a sigh.

“Yeah. Somebody being _us_ ,” Star Lord said, throwing a quick glare before returning his gaze at Thor, “so it'd be _really_ helpful if you had at least _some_ idea about where he was going. You said he's after Infinity Stones?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, at least that’s something,” Star Lord said. “We should go to Xandar then.”

At that, the rodent started to argue, and then the group fell into a bustle of loud and complicated conversation that Thor struggled to decipher. For a time, Thor waited for them to return their attention to him, but they continued bickering.

He imagined Loki, wherever he was now, screaming and flailing under the weight of Thanos’s power ( _if he is alive at all_ ), and Thor’s fists clenched, suddenly impatient. There was no time for this. He projected his voice over the sound of their arguing, “Which stone did you encounter on Xandar?”

They went quiet, and Star Lord raised an eyebrow at him. “Uh, the . . . Orb?”

Thor waved a dismissing hand. “No, that’s not—what color is it?”

“Purple,” the green woman said. “The power stone.”

With a start, Thor realized, despite the bickering of her teammates, she hadn’t taken her eyes off him even once. There was a knowledge there, a gaze of both suspicion and longing that Thor recognized all too well. He swallowed his questions—there wasn’t _time_. “He already has that one,” Thor told them and tried not to think so hard about what might have happened to Xandar. “The Time stone is on Midgard—”

“Midgard?” Star Lord asked.

“Earth. Terra,” Thor said. “But that one should be well-protected, and the people there have already been warned.” Hopefully. “The reality stone is with—” He cut off. Had it been his father or his brother who decided the fate of the aether? Would his brother have lied about that too? Thor inhaled a deep breath. “I _hope_ it’s with a being known as the Collector. Finding him is the best chance we have.” He paused, noting the recognition that flashed in some of their eyes. “Have you heard of him?” he asked, not quite daring to hope.

“Yeah.” The rodent folded his arms. “We’ve met him actually.”

“Good,” Thor said with a breath of relief. “Then if you’re truly willing to help, set a course to him. If we’re lucky, we’ll reach the reality stone first.”

Star Lord nodded and he started towards controls of the spaceship, when the green woman grabbed Star Lord by the arm and steered him back to into place. “Hold on,” she said, her voice pointed and her sharp eyes still fixed on Thor. Her other hand rested on her hip, fingers toying with the clasp of her belt where a weapon hung sheathed.

Uneasy, Thor watched her. Out of all of them, she looked to be the most dangerous.

“The being who captured you,” she said at last. “Did you happen to hear his name?”

His throat dried at the question, and he took a moment to force himself to swallow. “Thanos,” he said simply.

It was impossible to say whether she recognized the name or not; her expression remained cold and callous. The others, however, perked with comprehension, and the one named Drax took a large, eager step forward. “Did you say Thanos?”

“Yes,” Thor said.

The group started speaking to each other, all at once, and Thor struggled to single out any of their voices. His skull ached unbearably for a long second, and a noise had joined the pain, something that ticked on and on, in a steady rhythm that wouldn’t end. It was a new development, something that had started just after he’d parted from Loki to find the escape pods—

In an instant, Thor cut off the train of thought. He shook his head, doing his best to ignore the rhythmic thumping, and focus on the strange group in front of him instead.

The green woman caught his gaze. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” she said over the others, quieting them.

Star Lord glanced at her. “Gamora,” he said, “go easy on the guy.”

The green woman—or rather, Gamora—gave the Midgardian a look. “I know how Thanos operates,” she said to him, barely loud enough for Thor to make out. “We’re all targets for killing Ronan, let alone the fact that Thanos might be after me for betraying him. The SOS call could have been a setup, and this ‘guy’ could be a spy—”

“Hold on,” Thor said, his heart lurching. “What did you say? You found me because of an SOS call?”

All pairs of eyes shot to him, somewhat more suspicious than before.

Their silence, however, was confirmation. Thor both rioted and dimmed at the idea that it had been his brother behind the call—how much of this had Loki planned before they had even escaped from the cell? When had Loki made the call? What had he said? What had he sounded like?

It was clear they weren’t going to tell him. At least, not right now.

Thor sighed and held out his palms as a gesture of peace. “I’m not a spy,” he told Gamora, “but I don’t have any way to prove it to you. All I know is that I have to get to the Collector, before he—before Thanos does. If that means dropping me on the nearest planet and sending me on my way, then so be it. If you’re willing to help me? Even better.”

The group of them shared glances. Eventually they all looked to Star Lord.

“It could be a trap,” Gamora whispered.

Star Lord seemed to spend a moment considering, before he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Gotta do it anyway.” With that, the group dispersed. Star Lord and the racoon headed to the upper level of the ship where the controls presumably awaited, Drax and the antennae-girl started speaking quietly to each other, and the tree became absorbed in some kind of device.

It left Gamora, watching him with folded arms.

The weight of her gaze made Thor nervous, and the headache pounding in his head grew with the stress. He’d thought it had been getting better, but ever since Loki’s absence—pain stabbed through his head, and Thor ran his hands over his temples and through his hair. Hours later, and it still throbbed intolerably. He tried to ignore it.

Withdrawing his hands from his head, Thor found that he was covered in dirt and blood, and the sight provoked a deep nausea in his gut, urging him to be clean, even though standing up and moving around was the last thing he wanted to do.

It was with a steel will that he looked up to Gamora and asked her, “Is there some kind of washroom on this ship?”

She blinked, and a wave of pity spilled over her features.

Thor’s ears burned with shame.

“It’s over there,” she said and pointed to the opening to a small room.

Thor nodded and made his way over.

…

Thor hated to waste the water of the ship, but it took several soakings and several rags for his hands and face to be clean. It felt strange to stare at himself in the mirror and see unsullied skin, other than the bruise on his forehead and the ends of his scar under the eyepatch. He felt that there should be some mark, some sign of what he had suffered, but there wasn’t.

Though there hadn’t been any visible marks of what Loki had suffered either, several years ago.

Head thumping at the thought of his brother, Thor dumped the rags in the bin of dirty laundry next to the sink, and returned to the others. They were focused on one another, talking and arguing but also joking, and Thor, knowing that they’d already set the course he wanted, couldn’t bear to interrupt them. He was miserable and pitiful and he would infect them with his ill mood.

Instead, he scanned the room and ended up wandering over to the four oval windows overlooking the void of space. Thor stood for a while, staring, but eventually he felt too dizzy and too cold to remain upright. He tucked himself on the floor, back against the wall, cheek resting against the window, his shoulders shivering.

After a moment, he tried massaging his head, behind the ears like Loki had done, but it didn’t work or it wasn’t the same or maybe his head only ticked because he missed his brother. What had Loki wanted to tell him in that final second? What had he been so afraid to say?

“Hey.”

Thor jerked until he saw it was Gamora, poised a generous distance away from him, arms loose and relaxed at her sides.

He returned his gaze to the window.

“It’s gonna be several hours before we reach Knowhere,” she said. “If you want to rest, there’re beds around. Food, too.”

Thor’s eyelids drooped and his stomach rumbled, but his spirit was too dim to consider standing. Still, he cared enough to be polite. “Thank you,” he told her, “but I’m fine right here.”

Gamora’s feet shuffled.  

Thor wished that she would just go away, but then she stepped forward and sat across from him against the opposite wall. He looked at her wearily, preparing himself for more questions that he probably wouldn’t want to answer.

But she just stared through the window closest to her and inhaled deeply. “I know what it’s like,” she said.

He squinted at her. “What?”

Her eyes flickered to his and then away. “You were with him for hours, you said? I was with him most of my life. With—Thanos.”

Thor went still.

“I know how humiliating it is. To be vulnerable and helpless. To suspect anything good, for fear that it’ll be snatched away. I get it.” Gamora paused, and Thor noticed her jeweled fingers clasped over one of her knees, brittle and stiff just as Loki’s had been. “But you look like you’re about to faint, so you should probably eat something. Maybe sleep if you can.”

His lungs constricted, his breaths tight and rapid. Thor closed his eye, willing the throbbing in his head to at least match his own heartbeat. “Does that mean you trust me now?”

“Hardly.” Gamora shrugged. “But whether it’s sincere or not, I can see that you’re suffering. I want to help.”

“I thank you,” Thor forced himself to say, “but it’s not what you think.”

It was a bit of a lie—Thor hadn’t realized how much of a mess he was until she so accurately pointed it out—but it was mostly true. If Loki was alive ( _he is, he is, he is_ ), then surely he, too, was suffering, starving, exhausted, and it was something that connected them, even eons apart.

Filling the void in his stomach or dozing into dreams for one blessed second—the thought felt like a blade that would slice the string holding their hearts together, and Thor couldn’t let the thought of his brother go.

Gamora waited for him to elaborate, and Thor didn’t know how to explain something so foolish. He breathed in, ragged and tired. “It’s just that . . .” he tried, but the words failed him. His brain lurched, and he trembled through a wave of cold nausea.

Seconds passed, as he tried to blink through his blurred, swirly vision. Whatever was wrong with his head, it wasn’t going away. His power hadn’t returned either, as Loki had promised—but Loki had promised many other things that turned out to be lies. Thor wanted to hate his brother, for damning those innocent Aesir, for lying about everything, for ensuring Thor’s worst fear would come true.

He wanted to. And he couldn’t.

At last, the spell of dizziness passed, and Thor looked up to find Gamora still sitting across from him, still watching him. still waiting. “What do you want from me?” he asked her, because, Norns, he wished she would leave him alone.

Gamora frowned. “I don’t want anything.”

And maybe Thor would have believed her years ago, or even hours ago, but, as it was, he didn’t think he could believe anyone anymore. “What do you want?” he repeated, fixing her with his one-eyed stare.

At that, she pressed her lips together and looked away—and Thor _hated_ that he’d been right to ask.

“I just . . . have a question,” she said. “Assuming you’ve been honest with us. But you don’t have to answer. Especially not right now—”

“Ask it,” Thor said.

Gamora hesitated for only a short second, before she leaned forward and spoke. “I have a sister. She’s a little taller than me. Blue. And she has some body enhancements, including a metal arm. She was going to . . . to fight Thanos.” Her hands unlocked from her knee, and withdrew to hide behind her legs. “I was wondering if you happened to see her. Or hear of her.”

_Loki_ , his thoughts rang in time with the ticking in his head.

Thor blinked through a new round of nausea. “What is her name?”

“Nebula.”

Fighting to keep thoughts of Loki at bay, Thor went through his memories, considering everyone he saw and every name he had heard. “No. Nothing comes to mind.”

Gamora’s face flashed with life—her lips thinning, her brow furrowing, and her eyes watering—but then she blinked, and her expression closed off once more. “Thank you,” she said, even though Thor hadn’t really done anything at all. And even though her question had been answered and she had gotten what she wanted, she remained seated across from him, her gaze shifting to the stars outside the oval windows.

In the silence, the engine of the ship hummed through Thor’s bones. The cool metal against his planted palms vibrated and chilled, and Thor rebelled against the needs in his body. He was hungry, he was thirsty. He wanted to sleep.

The _tick_ , _tick_ , _tick_ in his mind strengthened to a pounding thump that almost seemed to chime Loki’s name, and he both wished to purge the name from his mind and feared to forget the glimmer of green in his brother’s eyes.

Minutes of their shared silence passed, but she looked content to sit there, motionless and speechless, for hours to come. With a glance towards the others, Thor considered that maybe she was the one meant to keep an eye on him—in case he was a spy planted here by Thanos, here to cause ruin and death.

At the thought, he wondered what her connection with Thanos was, how she had come to know such an evil being.

(Whether she had known Loki.)

He cleared his parched throat. “You said you were with Thanos?”

Gamora threw him a sharp glance—but her suspicion faded quickly at whatever she saw in his face. “Yes,” she said.

“As a prisoner?”

“In a way.” With a sigh, Gamora shifted to cross her legs and fold her hands in her lap. She stared down, not meeting his gaze. “He took me from my home. Massacred my family, destroyed my planet.” Her voice, toneless and plain, as if she were speaking of the weather, dropped an octave. “Then he called me his daughter and trained me to serve him. To do his bidding. I only escaped a few years ago.”

Thor winced. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s not a secret.” She shrugged carelessly, even as the toes of her boots twitched in an anxious rhythm. “Why do you ask?”

“You said you have a sister? Well, I have a brother,” he said, even as his heart urged him to say _had_. Even as Thor rebelled against the fear, fighting it, because Loki was surely still alive, still breathing, still fighting. “Years ago, he was captured as well.” Thor breathed in— _Thanos clutching Thor’s head and squeezing, scraping, twisting—_ and breathed out. “His name is Loki. Did you know him?”

Gamora’s expression closed off. “Are you asking if I helped to torture him?”

At the thought, his ears roared with chilling nausea. “Did you?”

For a moment, Gamora didn’t answer.

Even as rage thrummed in Thor’s veins, he carefully kept his fists un-clenched, and his muscles relaxed, because as much as he wanted someone to blame, it wasn’t her he hated. It wasn’t Loki, who had also been bent to the Mad Titan’s urges all those years ago as well.

It was Thanos. Thanos and all those who willingly served him.

“I don’t remember their names. Or their faces. Forgetting—it was how I survived,” she said. Her eyes glimmered with remorse, and her voice wavered, if only slightly. She met his gaze. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry if I did.”

Thor shuddered with a breath. “It’s—not important right now.” He paused, hesitating again, because this was all he had left, and he was terrified she wouldn’t let him have it. The fear festered in his bones like ice. He swallowed, before he dared to speak. “You said there was an SOS call that gave you my location. I think—I think it was my brother who sent it. From Thanos’s ship.”

Immediately, Gamora’s gaze furrowed, with narrowed, suspicious eyes.

Thor held up his hands, palms outward. “I just want to listen to it,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “I just . . . want to know what he said.”

After a time, the suspicion melted into pity.

Simply by looking into her eyes, Thor could tell what she was thinking—that his brother was long gone, long dead. He hated her for thinking it. He hated himself for thinking it, too.

Slowly, her eyes ran over him once, twice, and then she sighed and pushed herself to her feet. “Fine,” she said. “But I’m going to insist that you eat something first. And then lie down somewhere. Alright?”

She held out a hand, but Thor hesitated.

Gamora stared at him. “Look,” she said. “You need to regain your strength at some point. Wherever your brother is, I’m sure he would want you to rest.”

Even though he didn’t like it, she was right—he was no use to Loki, or anyone, like this.

Steeling himself, Thor took her hand and rose to his feet.

…

Fully fed, Thor lay on the short bed, knees bent to provide enough room for his legs, and head against the pillow, staring at the un-furnished ceiling. His mind continued to click, like the ticking of a clock, over and over, driving him mad. His right fist cradled the recording device next to his ear, and he played it, repeatedly, like a lullaby.

“Yes,” said Loki’s voice, breathy and strained, “yes, I can hear you. Over.” A pause of empty space. “Yes, we still need help. Hold on. Let me get you the coordinates.”

Thor closed his eye and listened to the numbers enunciated perfectly into the recording, etched into his mind, never to be forgotten. His head throbbed at the sound in an unending _tick_ , _tick_ , _tick_.

Only after the coordinates were read did the connection start to stumble. “. . . with the eyepatch . . . still be alive . . .” And then the coordinates coming in and out, in and out, like an ocean wave, and Thor wished with all of his heart, that his brother wouldn’t have wasted those precious seconds reading numbers that had already been received. That he’d spent those precious seconds on something else, _anything_ else.

That he’d had, just a little more time, a little more of a chance to say what he’d been meaning to say.

The recording ended in a crackle of static.

It was on a countless replay of the audio that Thor finally accepted the truth.

Loki was dead.

If he wasn’t by now, he soon would be.

And there was no way for Thor to save him. It was real this time. The truth burrowed a bottomless hole into his gut, leaving him barren and empty of all but this relentless headache and a cascade of voided promises—the one where they would escape together, the one where Loki would find him, the one where Thor’s power would return after enough rest, and maybe even the one where Loki had been there with him at all.

At last, he was an orphan and an only child. A worthless recording was his only souvenir.

Raging, Thor slammed his hand holding the recording into the stiff mattress beneath him, rolled over, and tried to sleep.

Twice, Thor dozed into the world of dreams that started so innocently—a warm embrace, arms locked around shoulders, a gathering of smiles and humor, reuniting with the green meadow of Midgard that perhaps would be their home—

_The flash of a gauntlet complete with six glowing stones, and fiery, barren plains of ash that stretched for miles and miles and miles, corpses of all that he knew._

Or, _a hole in his brother’s chest, as he screamed Thor’s name, and fell and fell and fell and Thor simply couldn’t reach._

Both times, the dream only lasted minutes at most.

Both times, he started awake with a choked cry.

The second time, there was a figure beside him, and it wasn’t Gamora, it wasn’t anyone he recognized in the sleepy fog of his mind. Thor startled upright, and barred his hands into two clenched fists. Then his vision cleared, and he could see who it was. The girl, the one with the antennas, took a step backward, holding one of her palms out and her shoulders hunching inward, and Thor relaxed as soon as he recognized her—and more importantly, when she didn’t attack.

“Sorry,” she said, in a shy voice. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Running his fingers through his aching head, Thor sighed. “It’s fine,” he said. He paused. “What was your name again?”

“Mantis,” she said quietly. She stretched out her other hand, offering him a cup of water. “Gamora said you might be thirsty.”

“Oh, thank you.” He _was_ thirsty. Thor took the cup and guzzled its contents down in two large swallows.  The cool water washed down his throat and settled in his stomach, where it churned and gurgled with a fresh bout of nausea. He clenched his eye shut and held perfectly still. He did _not_ want to have to eat a meal again. Not until he’d slept properly.

When the nausea passed and Mantis didn’t leave, Thor surveyed her cautiously. “Is there something else?”

Mantis wrung her hands. “I heard you dreaming,” she said slowly.

Red rushed through his face. So she’d heard him wake from his nightmare.

“I’m able to sense emotions,” she said, “and influence them to an extent. That includes the ones you feel when you’re unconscious.” Her hands curled at her sides, as if she wanted to reach out, even though she didn’t. “If you want, I could help you sleep without dreaming.”

Thor hesitated.

On one hand, he was exhausted, they were hours away from their destination yet, and there was nothing more to do but sleep. On the other hand, he didn’t trust her, he feared to let his guard down, and Loki—

_Loki is dead_ , Thor reminded himself.

He burned with grief. His chest roared with the pain of it, and cold numbed the blood in his veins. He was exhausted. He wanted to sleep.

At his silence, Mantis shuffled between her feet. “It’s only if you want,” she said. “I can go if you’d prefer . . .”

Thor gave her a weary smile. “No. I’d appreciate it. Do I just—lay down then?”

Brightening, Mantis nodded, and after Thor, feeling very much like a helpless fool, propped himself against the mattress, Mantis pressed cool hands against the sides of his head. Her fingers brushed across the phantom trails Loki had massaged into his head, just hours ago. A ghostly chill swept through Thor’s body, settling in his chest.

Thor had never had the chance to say goodbye.

“Sleep,” Mantis said.

His eyelids closed. He slept.

…

When he woke, thunder thrummed in his chest, and lightning hummed at his fingertips.

Thor’s eyes opened, and he felt his power returning to him.

It was still weak, flickering within his veins like a dying candle, but it wasn’t shredded, it wasn’t gone, and he could send sparks through his fingertips without the agony in his head. Thor sat up, and channeled his power for several minutes, marveling at the way it strengthened with every pulse of his heartbeat that it was in use.

The nausea was gone. The dizziness swirling in his vision was gone. The throbbing headache was gone.

The only thing remaining was that blasted _tick, tick, tick_ in his head—but it didn’t hurt. It only ticked. Pestering at his attention, like a clock, or a bomb, perhaps, or maybe even a—

A spell.

A locator spell.

Terrified (and brimming with a sudden hope), Thor closed his eye and listened to the ticking sound that almost seemed to vibrate with Loki’s name. His brow smoothed as he focused, and he reached for the recording abandoned at his side, rubbing his thumb across the smooth metal length, using it to clear himself of everything but the prayer that there was a spell locked in his mind.

After moments of still, Thor could sense it.

Loki was alive.

Loki’s magic tugged at his brain in only one clear direction, and Thor, if he focused, could follow that line and make out the exact location of his brother, no matter how many eons separated them, or how much time had passed. As long as they both lived, the connection would remain, and Thor could find him.

Hope surged through his chest.

Loki was alive.

Loki had left Thor with a way to find him.

Eye snapping open, Thor flew to his feet, just as Gamora appeared in the doorway.

“I came to wake you,” Gamora said, looking a little surprised at his mood. “We’re almost there.”

Thor felt a smile spread across his face—the first real one he’d summoned since that fateful moment, where his brother had stood at his side and confided his fear in returning to Midgard. The way their eyes had met, and both of them had fallen easy into a warm expression of love.

“Be ready,” Thor told Gamora. “I believe Thanos might already be there.”

Whatever Loki had meant to say, it didn’t matter.

Thor would find out soon enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first time I ever wrote anything featuring the GotG, so please be gentle with my characterization. :( I tried my best, and I'll hopefully get better next time.
> 
> Anyway feel free to follow me on [tumblr](http://loxxxlay.tumblr.com) :)


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